I really thought there would be more of it…

Oh boy… I’ve been struggling for a couple weeks trying to replace Jetbrains/IntelliJ IDEA with Eclipse for a GWT/Maven project. To make things more challenging, I’m relatively new to Java, Linux, Maven, GWT, Hibernate, Artifactory, Eclipse and IntelliJ to begin with. I’m competent enough at the primary skill every programmer needs — Googling — but I still haven’t been able to get Eclipse to debug the client-side GWT code without unplugging Maven. I could do it in IntelliJ, but that was part of the problem… IntelliJ’s built-in runner would compile Java that shouldn’t compile. It would happily sail right past missing classes (because they were mis-named), multiple methods with the same erasure in the same scope… yikes! Hey, I appreciate the “it just works” experience, but I my definition of “works” definitely doesn’t include compensating for code defects that would never run outside of the IDE.

Well thanks to AdWords’ exemplary intent matching, I kept seeing little reminders to try NetBeans 7. I asked a few Java pros for their opinion of it, and most had tried it years ago & written it off as less-than-useful. If that’s accurate, then I’m here to tell you, NetBeans has grown up quite a bit since then. I grabbed release 7 and a couple plugins, read no more than three paragraphs of instructions on it, watched the first minute of a GWT tutorial, then started fiddling. An hour later, I had Maven, Artifactory, GWT and Tomcat all cooperating nicely with each other & I was stepping through client-side asynchronous methods in its debugger. I’m using the same source files as are Eclipse and IntelliJ without breakage, and the command-line Maven builds work fine too.

Sweet! Maybe now I can stop panicking over the complete lack of anything familiar in my environment and get back to cranking out platforms!

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Switching from KDE to Gnome…

I finally got fed up of the plethora of inexplicable crashes on my Linux system (Kubuntu 10.10 x86-64 if you must know). The Kate text editor would crash every time you clicked the Tools menu. MySQL Workbench crashed every time you hit File -> Open (or CTRL+O, or the “Open” toolbar button), and some-to-most of the time doing about half a dozen other things. Video was atrocious (any app, any source, any renderer), latency was bad enough to make you click on and type in the wrong window at times, the aesthetics were depressing… you get the picture.

So on a lark I decided to try switching my window manager from KDE to Gnome (just sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop, I didn’t actually switch distros from Kubuntu to Ubuntu or anything). Let me just say WOW! Not only is the user experience a drastic improvement over KDE (IMO, of course), but I would say it’s better than Windows 7. I’ve never experienced such responsiveness, even with animations and 3D app, monitor, and tab switching turned on, and a fancy animated 3D dock for my launchers and open apps (AWN if you must know). And it’s not just the OS-level stuff that feels smoother; video is astounding. I played two 720p videos fullscreen simultaneously, one on each monitor, with VLC, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of stutter. I could even fast forward and skip without issues. Flash works everywhere, even in the browsers you Windows junkies have never heard of before, like Reconq. Web browsing is faster in Firefox, Konqueror, Chrome, Chromium… everything I’ve tried so far.

I used to really prefer KDE, but either something was woefully b0rk3d with it on my system, or the Gnome team just has its shit together that much better these days. Either way, since switching yesterday, I’ve found myself reaching for the Windows 7 computer less and less. Thanks, Gnome!